Karen Solie

Born in 1966, the poet Karen Solie grew up on her family farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. Over her decades-long career, Solie has published six books of poetry, including, most recently, Wellwater (2025), The Caiplie Caves (2019), and The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (2015). As Michael Hofmann writes in the London Review of Books, “She is the one by whom the language lives.” In a world glutted with black-and-white thinking, prizing speed over thoughtfulness, Solie is that rare artist devoted to unflinching attention. Renowned for her mastery of language, Solie also infuses her poetry with the weight of contemplation in the face of political and ecological precarity. For Solie, poetry can be wild and metaphysical while honoring ethical considerations. In her poems, there are no easy answers, only the timeless work of seeing things as they really are. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award from the Canada Council for the Arts (2016), Solie teaches at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Her hope for her own poetry is to “keep alive, or at least gesture toward, the tension of complexity, complication, responsibility.”